If Books Could Kill - The Population Bomb

00:00:00.000 Peter. Michael. Are you familiar with a book called The Population Bomb?

00:00:04.840 I have heard of this book. I have not heard anything else.

00:00:09.700 I'm aware that there was a book from like the mid-century-ish that predicted overpopulation across the globe.

00:00:32.340 Yes. The Population Bomb came out in 1968. It's written by Paul Ehrlich, who's a professor at

00:00:37.860 Stanford, and it eventually sells two million copies. My initial gut instinct, there's an

00:00:43.600 academic talking about overpopulation. We are at most 10 minutes away from talking about eugenics

00:00:50.160 and 20 minutes away from talking about genocide. I don't know of any other way this can go. 0.70

00:00:55.100 It might take us slightly longer to get there, but that is absolutely where we're going.

00:00:59.620 Oh, God. Okay.

00:01:00.700 So we need to give a bit of background because as opposed to a lot of the other books that

00:01:05.120 we've covered on this show, this isn't proposing a new idea. This isn't like,

00:01:10.300 oh, 10,000 hours to play chess or whatever. This is basically crystallizing an idea that

00:01:16.060 had been bouncing around the culture for literally centuries. This is like one of the oldest ideas.

00:01:21.420 Right.

00:01:21.600 As far as I can tell, Thomas Malthus is the first person to sort of officially propose

00:01:25.800 the idea that the earth just has a limit to how much population it can hold, right? Like we're

00:01:33.800 not going to have an earth with a hundred billion people on it. Yeah. And population growth is

00:01:39.220 exponential, right? Women has three babies. They have three babies. They have three babies. 0.99

00:01:43.800 Whereas food production is linear, right? It's extremely difficult to double crop production

00:01:49.920 and then double it again and double it again. Yeah. So eventually you're just going to have

00:01:53.440 a mismatch between those two lines. And that means there just aren't enough resources for

00:01:59.220 everybody to eat enough. Well, look, I've heard enough. It's time to do population control on

00:02:03.960 poor people, right? I mean, that's all there is to it. But this is kind of the thing, right, is 1.00

00:02:08.920 this idea is extremely tempting to people with the worst imaginable politics. So this becomes a

00:02:16.580 really important idea in eugenics before World War II. After the Second World War, you can't 0.93

00:02:22.740 really say eugenics openly anymore, but you can talk about family planning and you can talk about,

00:02:30.300 oh, you know, there might just not be enough to go around. And so we need to start asking some

00:02:36.840 tough questions about who's going to get what we already have. Right. If only poor people could

00:02:43.340 exercise the good judgment that we do, things would be fine. But since they cannot, we need 1.00

00:02:47.880 to talk about our options. Exactly. Our incredibly violent options. This is a huge problem and I'm

00:02:52.440 willing for other people to make some sacrifices is basically the way that it gets framed okay so

00:02:58.200 i'm gonna send you a time magazine cover from like peak population fears this is actually before

00:03:05.400 paul earlick's book comes out but like this stuff was already a huge societal anxiety

00:03:10.520 that he was basically reanimating so you're gonna love this oh no no god oh my god sometimes the

00:03:21.400 racism in these old time covers is like a little dog whistle and this one it's like an air raid

00:03:25.620 siren this is just images of women of color and their babies yeah there's like a topless african

00:03:31.800 lady like breastfeeding her kids there's like a i guess like chinese lady with her son and she

00:03:38.480 looks kind of like sad like it's all these images of sort of like sad squalid conditions well no

00:03:44.620 there is there's actually one beautiful white family that yes where the child the child is 0.73

00:03:50.380 holding a giant loaf of bread our abundance the white family is fine exactly it's like oh the 0.66

00:03:57.740 white lady's fine but look at all these hungry babies in the rest of the world basically to say 0.90

00:04:01.700 the to say the least and the banner says that population explosion so basically like this this

00:04:10.180 is where we were in the 1960s that this was pretty widely circulated already but what paul ehrlich

00:04:17.020 did was he merged the overpopulation anxieties with the environmentalist movement. He was the

00:04:22.700 first person to really make the case that to save the planet, we have to start looking at the number

00:04:28.160 of people on it. Right. It sort of feeds into this sort of lefty environmentalist idea that people

00:04:34.720 are the problem. Exactly. Yes. Right. So Paul Ehrlich is an entomologist. He's like an insect

00:04:40.460 researcher. Oh, boy. I cannot stress enough how like how no training in this he has. Like this

00:04:45.640 is not his field of he doesn't do demographics he doesn't do populations he's literally a butterfly 0.97

00:04:50.800 researcher oh shit so paul earlick comes to this through the sierra club he starts attending

00:04:57.000 meetings in the bay area and he actually wrote the book with his wife ann but the publisher 0.97

00:05:04.100 thought it wouldn't sell as well if it had a woman's name on the cover so they took her off

00:05:08.740 and he's been the public face of this for basically the last like 40 years oh man it's

00:05:14.160 It's getting so bleak so fast.

00:05:15.800 I know, we're like five minutes in.

00:05:17.300 We haven't even gotten to the book yet.

00:05:20.360 So, okay, I'm going to send you the prologue.

00:05:24.100 This is basically, this sets the tone and gives you a sense of like the kind of person

00:05:29.580 Paul Ehrlich is.

00:05:30.700 The battle to feed all of humanity is over.

00:05:34.260 In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of

00:05:39.880 any crash programs embarked upon now.

00:05:42.800 Oh, so he means over like we lost the battle to feed all of humanity.

00:05:45.900 It's done.

00:05:47.300 It's locked in.

00:05:48.720 Oh, my God.

00:05:50.260 At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,

00:05:54.280 although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to stretch the carrying capacity of the earth

00:05:59.580 by increasing food production and providing for more equitable distribution of whatever food is available.

00:06:05.320 But these programs will only provide a stay of execution

00:06:08.200 unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.

00:06:14.420 It cannot be overemphasized, however, that no changes in behavior or technology can save us

00:06:20.700 unless we achieve control over the size of the human population.

00:06:24.760 The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate, or mankind will breed itself into oblivion.

00:06:33.200 We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth,

00:06:37.820 the cancer itself must be cut out the cancer the cancer must be cut out oh my god

00:06:44.500 bringing the death rate and the birth rate into balance is like when when i hear those words i i

00:06:53.720 don't know how you're not immediately thinking about mass murder this is like his whole his

00:06:59.000 whole argument is about the fact that like there's only two ways to achieve population stability

00:07:03.460 right, which is to raise the death rate or to drop the birth rate. His overall argument is basically,

00:07:09.240 look, guys, we have no choice. Either we have to ensure mass death, right, we have to raise the

00:07:14.860 death rate, or we need to bring down the birth rate. So by bringing down the birth rate, we're

00:07:19.860 not actually being bad people. What we're doing is we're saving the lives of everyone we would

00:07:24.200 have to kill otherwise, right? It's like he gives you these two completely fake options, either mass

00:07:30.420 death or population like deranged population control policies that we will get to and it's

00:07:36.220 like if those are your only two options then like yeah you're gonna choose the birth stuff

00:07:40.440 but those aren't actually in any way the only two options my my years of studying butterflies have

00:07:48.020 made me realize that the human race is faced with an ultimatum all right so do you want to hear his

00:07:53.180 case for this yeah yeah let's go maybe i'll be convinced i feel like this is going to be a

00:07:57.140 running theme of this podcast. He starts the book by talking about how he got radicalized on this

00:08:03.860 issue when he went on a trip to India and he like went on a cab ride through New Delhi.

00:08:11.140 Oh my God, he's doing a Thomas Friedman. He's doing a Thomas Friedman.

00:08:14.540 He says, my wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.

00:08:18.440 The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through

00:08:23.520 the city we entered a crowded slum area the temperature was well over a hundred and the air

00:08:28.020 was a haze of dust and smoke the streets seemed alive with people people thrusting their hands

00:08:33.120 through the taxi window begging people defecating and urinating people clinging to buses people

00:08:38.400 hurting animals people people people people i mean he's just witnessing poverty yes in another

00:08:44.480 culture in a form he's maybe not accustomed to and saying oh my god we've got we have a global

00:08:50.400 problem exactly this is like white dude staring out of the window of a cab disease right like

00:08:56.420 he's he's universalizing all of this and also he has no understanding of the specific dynamics

00:09:02.080 of india at that time so in in further debunkings that we will get into people point out that first

00:09:08.120 of all at the time new delhi only had a population of 2.5 million people like paris had a population

00:09:13.440 of 8 million at the time right so like this has nothing to do with the number of people right

00:09:18.220 It's about, like, the infrastructure that's available, the levels of poverty, etc.

00:09:21.840 And also, India was just coming out of the India-Pakistan war at the time.

00:09:26.740 So he also goes to, like, these remote areas in Kashmir where there's all this, like, what he calls environmental damage.

00:09:31.960 But it's, like, it's the aftermath of a war. 0.86

00:09:34.080 It's the aftermath of, like, a man-made conflict that he is then describing as, like, well, there's just too many people.

00:09:39.720 So what year is that when he's in New Delhi?

00:09:42.660 I think it was 66 when he was there.

00:09:44.380 OK. So, I mean, I was just I was sort of thinking, how far how long after a famine that the British intentionally caused?

00:09:53.120 Are we? And the answer is about 20 years.

00:09:55.600 This is basically the first prong of his argument.

00:09:57.500 So the argument of the entire book is three. He has three main arguments.

00:10:01.260 So the first is just that, like, there's too many people in the world.

00:10:04.880 There's nothing there's nothing really to debunk here.

00:10:07.100 He does. I'm sure you've seen these things, too, where they talk about, like, the doubling times of humanity.

00:10:11.600 Yeah. Up until the year 1600 or something, the doubling time was like every thousand years.

00:10:17.660 Then it doubled every 200 years. And then it doubled every 35 years, right? Like the doubling

00:10:22.700 times of humanity are getting shorter and shorter. Right. This is one of my favorite parts of the

00:10:26.360 book. He talks about how, you know, it's now it's now every 35 years, it's doubling, right?

00:10:31.800 He says, if growth continues at that rate for 900 years, there will be about 60 million billion

00:10:39.600 people on the face of the earth that is about 100 persons for every square yard of the earth's

00:10:45.660 surface land and sea and then he says it would take only about 50 years to populate venus mercury

00:10:52.640 mars the moon and the moons of jupiter and saturn to the same population density as earth all right

00:10:57.860 you don't understand his work with butterflies michael you've got to really dig in to understand

00:11:02.560 i do like that he's proactively thinking about solutions he's like even if we populate the uh 0.99

00:11:07.460 the moons of jupiter we we still have a problem so don't even fucking talk to me don't fucking 0.94

00:11:12.340 talk to me about populating the moons of jupiter i know you're gonna say it but don't say it 0.98

00:11:16.360 i'm one step ahead of you punk yeah he also he says like with that many people this teeming

00:11:23.140 mass of humanity the body heat of all the people would exceed the melting point of iron it's another

00:11:29.820 big problem yeah paul i love i love the image of a world where we're all physically jammed together

00:11:37.340 So like to the point where we can't move and also like it's getting really hot and people are still having sex. 0.95

00:11:43.860 Like someone like three people over from you, they're fucking and you're like, guys, are you not learning anything? 0.97

00:11:49.340 Like I'm boiling alive over here. 0.99

00:11:52.020 Guys, we're smelting iron right now.

00:11:54.000 I mean, look, you know how those like they're like honeybees that can kill intruders in the hive by rubbing themselves together and burning them up.

00:12:03.500 That would be happening to all of humanity at once in his mind.

00:12:07.340 before anyone does anything or anything else goes wrong.

00:12:10.800 Incredible.

00:12:11.360 So basically, I mean, this is like the vision that he's setting out.

00:12:13.560 And then, of course, he says that population growth is the fastest in poor countries.

00:12:17.240 So after he's painted you this vision, he says, like, OK, for the world, it's like we're

00:12:20.860 doubling every 35 years. 0.62

00:12:22.500 But then in, like, Kenya, it's 23 years.

00:12:24.780 In Nigeria, it's 27 years.

00:12:26.300 In Costa Rica, 19 years. 0.90

00:12:28.060 So, of course, he immediately goes to, like, the poorest parts of the world.

00:12:31.280 And he's like, well, they're even worse.

00:12:32.920 And they're the ones that are driving this.

00:12:34.620 Yeah, I guess if I had to brainstorm about, like, who in particular is the problem, I guess I would say them over there.

00:12:43.060 He also says that overpopulation is a problem in rich countries, specifically the United States.

00:12:48.940 So he's like, overpopulation is a problem for us, too.

00:12:51.720 And he has, like, statistics about the baby boom, right?

00:12:53.880 There have been this, like, little spike of people having babies after World War II.

00:12:57.020 And then this is, like, very telling.

00:12:59.740 In wealthy countries, he says, overpopulation does not normally mean too many people for

00:13:03.980 the area of a country, but too many people in relation to the necessities and amenities

00:13:08.640 of life.

00:13:10.240 Overpopulation occurs when numbers threaten values.

00:13:13.900 So he's basically saying in the developing world, it's like population.

00:13:17.980 It's raw numbers, right?

00:13:18.960 Nigeria is doubling its population. 0.99

00:13:20.340 Fine. 0.95

00:13:20.740 But then in rich countries, what he means by overpopulation is that too many people would

00:13:26.500 threaten the standard of life which is like a completely different claim right the vibes are

00:13:31.540 off right there's a lot of people around and it's really throwing the vibes off he complains a lot

00:13:36.680 about traffic in this book like traffic and parking and stuff i love this because the interstates have

00:13:43.280 been up and running for like five years in this situation and he's already complaining it's also

00:13:47.780 really telling to me that he's writing this in the late 60s which is like peak like white flight

00:13:51.260 times right yeah so he also has this whole thing about urbanization and about how the real problem 0.57

00:13:56.380 is like people are crowding into cities and he just repeats like white flight like crime is rising

00:14:03.300 and social unrest and like you can't even go to a restaurant without waiting in line anymore which

00:14:07.840 is all just like crypto racist like oh they're all filling up with people i don't like looking

00:14:12.600 at or i don't like sharing space with so we're looking at again a bifurcated complaint one we're

00:14:18.780 going to reproduce so much that we all hit a literal boiling point and explode yes uh two 0.94

00:14:25.340 there's fucking poor people everywhere man i know he's like first of all we can't we can't go to 0.95

00:14:30.400 venus second of all traffic it's unbelievable these days i know he talks about how you can't 0.99

00:14:36.340 even take like uh weekend trips to yosemite anymore because it like takes too long to get

00:14:40.020 out of the city i'm like paul this is what you're complaining about in your book about how we're all

00:14:45.480 gonna die okay but he also i think this is like a very depressing detour that the environmental

00:14:52.420 movement took in america in the 1970s there's a really telling sentence in this section where he

00:14:57.880 says he's talking about urbanization and how cities are so bad and he says adding more people

00:15:02.440 to an area increases the damage done by each individual is that is that right it's exactly

00:15:08.020 the opposite yeah the more people in a city the more you all share resources so like one meter of

00:15:14.420 a power line serves many more people in a city one meter of like water infrastructure people tend to

00:15:19.960 live in smaller spaces when they live in cities so they don't heat and cool a larger area like a

00:15:23.360 bunch of empty rooms all year you don't drive if you live in a city like you can look up the carbon

00:15:27.700 footprint of people in suburbs and exsubs versus people in cities it's like three to four times

00:15:31.800 higher the thing that is bad is sprawl right like literally the more people live in skyscrapers the

00:15:37.500 more nature you can preserve maybe it's because he's talking about an implied alternative not

00:15:42.880 where there's more sprawl but where there are fewer people right yes that's the world he's sort

00:15:47.580 of asking you to envision implicitly, right? Imagine not that half of New York was out in

00:15:54.000 the suburbs, but that half of New York was not there at all.

00:15:57.820 Right, exactly. The vision he's laying out is one where there's just far fewer people on the

00:16:02.200 planet. So when he's writing this, the global population is around 2.5 billion. And at one

00:16:07.720 point, he just sort of throws out that like 1 billion is enough. And because we're already over

00:16:15.560 this fake limit that he's set up the priority now has to be on reducing the number of people

00:16:22.440 not improving the living standards of people who are already here and any treats received

00:16:27.900 by poor people will simply be turned into more babies right i mean that sort of brings us to the

00:16:33.600 next argument which is that we're not producing enough food for all of this reproduction so he

00:16:39.540 basically says that like rich countries started transferring food to poor countries pretty soon

00:16:44.620 after world war ii you know food aid programs etc already countries like india aren't producing

00:16:49.740 enough for their populations he also i i want to be very clear with this because he says throughout

00:16:55.220 the book actually a lot of stuff that i agree with and a lot of stuff that is like normal left-wing

00:17:00.120 stuff so one thing he says in this section is he says the united states has supported an unhappy

00:17:05.740 status quo throughout the third world we've backed a series of dictators and oligarchs in numerous

00:17:10.680 countries under a phony banner of anti-communism. By open and covert action, we have prevented land

00:17:16.400 reform and other socio-political changes which are needed before reasonable agricultural

00:17:21.000 development can occur. Based Ehrlich. Preach, brother. I know. Paul Ehrlich. We stan. Eco-fascist

00:17:28.380 king. But he's basically, I mean, I think it's important to note that like this book is very

00:17:32.120 much coming from the left. Yeah. Like this is not a guy who identifies as a conservative. He's

00:17:36.060 someone who's been really active in the environmental movement. Right. There's like

00:17:39.060 lots of stuff in this book about how like corporations are bad and how u.s imperialism

00:17:43.620 is bad like there's actually a lot of stuff here that is like true and right and agreeable but he's

00:17:49.920 just using it to come to the most deranged conclusions and like not realizing the like

00:17:56.220 crypto fascist agenda that he's actually proposing and like trying to convince you of oh god it's

00:18:01.580 horseshoe theory it's it's 100 it's like the original horseshoe book yeah so right after he

00:18:05.960 says like oh we you know we've been mean to the third world and like we've installed dictatorships

00:18:09.880 etc he then talks about how because there's not enough food there's gonna start to be all these

00:18:15.080 like mass starvation events he then says can we guess what effect this growing disparity will

00:18:21.280 have on our shipmates in poor countries will they starve gracefully without rocking the boat

00:18:25.860 or will they attempt to overwhelm us in order to get what they consider to be their fair share 0.86

00:18:31.480 we are going to have to face some extremely difficult but unavoidable decisions by how much

00:18:37.580 and at what environmental risk should we increase our domestic food production in an attempt to feed

00:18:42.980 the starving how will we react when asked to balance the lives of a million latin americans

00:18:47.640 against say a 30 cent per pound rise in the average price of beef will we be willing to 0.98

00:18:53.700 slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to these starving masses in asia 0.98

00:18:59.720 what i know this is the other thing where he's setting up like oh i guess you want to kill all 0.71

00:19:07.120 the dogs and cats huh and you're like what paul that's i i love that we're like he's envisioned

00:19:13.480 a situation where we are staving off global hunger by like shipping cat meat abroad like that

00:19:20.660 do you know what would happen before we get to that point paul i know how like walk me through

00:19:28.740 the steps paul how do we get to me killing my cat and sending it to cambodia please and i presumably

00:19:34.720 at the government's direction right like a fed is knocking on your door like hand over patches

00:19:40.700 so the first two arguments are like there's too many people there's not enough food and then his

00:19:45.240 third argument for this is that like too many people are already destroying the environment

00:19:49.620 so easily a third of the book is just him filibustering about environmental damage he

00:19:56.460 He talks about polluted rivers.

00:19:58.760 He talks about like a lot of stuff about pesticides.

00:20:01.520 He talks about this.

00:20:02.760 There's this long running campaign in Arizona to try to kill fire ants.

00:20:07.420 And like they were going to dust 20 million square acres of Arizona with this like pesticide and then people sued and blah, blah, blah.

00:20:14.380 And it's like, OK, but like what does this have to do with population, Paul?

00:20:18.440 Yeah. He wants you to infer that because pesticides are bad, we need to do something about population control rather than perhaps like the very specific subset of people who are doing the pesticide.

00:20:31.040 And these are not problems in the developing world either. Right. He's talking about pesticides that are being overused in America.

00:20:36.740 And it's like, well, we can just not do that in America then. Like that really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in the rest of the world.

00:20:43.580 And he never really justifies why this is like inevitable if there's more people.

00:20:47.860 Right, right. Which, you know, look, I get it. If I were ever to write a book,

00:20:51.940 I guarantee you a good chunk of it is just going to be me talking about shit I feel like talking 0.98

00:20:56.960 about. Okay, so another thing that I feel like has kind of been lost to time, because this is 0.94

00:21:02.000 like a famous book, and famous books, like nobody ever reads famous books, right? They just get the

00:21:05.740 like Reader's Digest version. And so at least a quarter of this book is taken up with fictional

00:21:13.240 scenarios so he writes like novelistic descriptions like from the future so one of the scenarios

00:21:22.780 starts with margaret andrews had very few choices in her life since richard was killed in the riots 0.93

00:21:29.820 oh my fucking god oh my fucking god it's like what are you doing dude and then he spends like 25 1.00

00:21:37.080 pages walking through this thing where there's like a global pandemic what an idiot that'll 1.00

00:21:42.260 never happen i know all right paul's like one for two on that fine and then okay but then he does 0.99

00:21:49.360 this fucked up bait and switch so the final scenario he's walking us through like these 0.79

00:21:53.100 two nightmarish scenarios of like everything going wrong the third scenario is like looking 0.96

00:21:57.580 back from the future on like what we did right and it's describing like all these like u.n

00:22:02.840 convenings of like the countries coming together and like everyone loves it he talks he has this

00:22:09.060 fake quote from like the future premiere of china saying like russia and america are our friends

00:22:15.320 because they gave us all this like food and tractors and pesticides starting in the 1960s

00:22:21.020 like thanks america it's all all this kumbaya shit so i'm reading this and i'm like okay so 0.88

00:22:27.240 like maybe it's not so bad like it sounded it sounded quite reactionary and terrible yeah like 0.89

00:22:31.680 okay he's proposing more participatory systems where like poor countries and rich countries can

00:22:36.440 come together a more cooperative world yeah maybe maybe paul's not so bad and then we get to the

00:22:41.480 next chapter where he talks about like his actual proposals oh god so of course because he's

00:22:47.380 bifurcating this problem without actually admitting that that's what he's doing he starts off by

00:22:51.420 talking about how we need to reduce population growth in the u.s he floats the idea but doesn't

00:22:57.640 totally commit to it of adding sterilants to the water supply oh but the thing is he's too 0.95

00:23:04.680 chicken shit to actually propose it he says many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory 0.96

00:23:11.160 birth regulation would be necessary to achieve birth control oh man he's doing he's doing a 0.99

00:23:16.440 trump many people are saying it for uh sterilizing the entire population and then i fucking love this

00:23:22.920 so then he's like but that would never work obviously and then he sort of debunks it like

00:23:27.120 well that's not a real plan but then he says all of his objections to the plan are like on

00:23:32.260 technical grounds. Right. While well-meaning, the plan to sterilize every human being in the country

00:23:38.120 is logistically infeasible. Exactly. He's like, well, we don't have a substance that could

00:23:43.600 sterilize both men and women. And then he's also worried that it might affect the drinking water

00:23:50.180 of livestock. Let's make sure that our livestock are getting the good water that doesn't sterilize

00:23:55.160 you while the human beings drink drink from the murder water but so it's like it's the most

00:24:02.500 deranged thing where he he proposes this like fully like genocidal idea right just like let's

00:24:07.800 sterilize everybody and he's like it would never work you're like well there's probably other

00:24:12.620 reasons not to do it actually like i can think of a few i'm imagining just sort of like longingly

00:24:17.980 looking at a cow drinking water across a field and being like oh he's getting the good stuff

00:24:23.060 buying cow water 7-11 the black market for the sterilization free water but then because he's 0.99

00:24:33.160 too chicken shit to like actually commit to the obvious conclusions of his own idea he basically 0.94

00:24:38.200 spends the rest of the chapter like talking about america you know his his proposals for america 0.98

00:24:41.880 are all like super low grade easy stuff so he's like oh we should cut welfare benefits

00:24:47.880 for people who like have more than three kids which is like an unbelievably bad idea but it's

00:24:52.520 like a pretty bog standard republican idea he even names that this has like been proposed in

00:24:57.260 a bill that like you lose your child tax credits after three kids i mean look three kids is to the

00:25:02.220 that's to the left of the modern republican party he wants responsibility prizes for couples that

00:25:09.040 are married for five years but don't have kids oh my god dudes that have vasectomies after they

00:25:14.820 have two kids would also get a responsibility prize little pat on the back from paul also he

00:25:20.360 also doesn't have the courage of his convictions here because like as a gay guy where's my prize

00:25:25.840 that's right pay up every time i open grinder 75 dollars yeah sending your venmo request to

00:25:32.580 the government with just like three question marks after a long night but then i mean he also

00:25:39.340 it's like normal stuff he also says like there should be higher taxes on corporations

00:25:42.900 we should make corporations clean up their pollution spills like there's again a bunch

00:25:47.380 of like filibustery environmental stuff which is like yeah we should do all that i love that he

00:25:52.200 has in the prescriptive phase gotten weirdly neoliberal with these little ticky tack

00:25:57.060 solutions he's like what if we incentivized you know certain people to engage in less sexual

00:26:03.080 activity or whatever when the uh diagnosis was we're all going to reproduce so much that we

00:26:10.180 literally explode yes right the the mismatch is fucking wild it's like you're like what about a 0.69

00:26:15.660 gas tax, Paul. And he's like, Hey, let's not get carried away. Let's not do anything drastic in 0.95

00:26:20.060 America. All right. Tone it down. But then, okay. Then we get to the section where he talks about

00:26:25.300 what we need to do internationally. So he uses the metaphor of triage, like hospital triage.

00:26:32.460 Do you know how this works? I'm really embarrassed to say no, but that's the truth.

00:26:36.680 It's a term that I've heard and a term that I have used. And I definitely only learned what

00:26:42.160 it is this week that makes me feel better so the idea is when there's like a big earthquake or some

00:26:47.100 sort of major event there's like hundreds of people coming into the er hospitals do this thing

00:26:51.560 where it's like you split people into three groups there's people who are going to die regardless of

00:26:56.700 what you do for them right like really grievous injuries and then there's people who are going to

00:27:00.960 live regardless of what you do for them like people who have like a sprained ankle or something

00:27:04.300 and then there's people who like they will live if they get treatment and they will die if they

00:27:10.020 don't get treatment right and so when a hospital goes to triage mode they focus exclusively on

00:27:14.840 those people and like anyone else just like doesn't get seen that's the idea right it's a

00:27:19.500 way of prioritizing right so the first step of this plan for the world is splitting countries

00:27:26.220 into these categories oh no i know so there's basically countries that are like fine and then

00:27:33.580 there's countries that are going to have starvation so profound that they're not going to be able to

00:27:37.540 make it because their populations are growing too fast. Also, nothing we can do for them.

00:27:41.540 And then there's the group in the middle of countries that we need to actually like help.

00:27:45.480 So all of our international efforts now should be at identifying countries in those three

00:27:51.580 categories. That's that's going to be a high stakes UN vote. I'll tell you that.

00:27:55.640 And then he's not specific about who decides which countries are in these categories. Right. I mean,

00:28:01.800 even in a triage like a hospital situation, it's a huge judgment call. Like, is this person going

00:28:06.040 to die with this injury or not and it's even more complicated when it comes to countries he's not

00:28:10.780 clear about that he specifically rejects the idea of using the un to do this because he's like the

00:28:16.820 un has like you know the poor countries are like members of the un and like they might not like

00:28:21.380 this unfortunately the countries will be voting in their own interests and we cannot have that

00:28:26.000 unfortunately they don't like when we decide their fate so we need to like set up a club of

00:28:32.400 the other he's like oh we need to get a club with like australia the uk germany whatever yeah yeah

00:28:36.660 let's just i don't just naming some countries off the top of my head for example us uk germany

00:28:43.300 france australia i'm just just randomly selecting from my mind space so this program after we split

00:28:49.980 the countries into three groups the first thing is like all this propaganda in foreign countries

00:28:56.000 So he wants to send, like, TVs to rural areas of poor countries to, like, tell them not to have babies.

00:29:05.240 He says, 0.98

00:29:26.000 pact oh god what the fuck so it's like have you tried being less poor we should tell people in 0.99

00:29:32.180 poor countries that they should try not being poor anymore i'm gonna go to nigeria and start 0.99

00:29:36.900 talking about grind set let's talk about hustle folks let's talk about waking up rising and

00:29:42.340 grinding i know every day we're shipping live laugh love posters to all homes in the developing

00:29:48.480 world the shipping tvs thing is phenomenal because you know that his first thought was like well we

00:29:53.320 need to send propaganda and he's like okay what's propaganda it's like stuff you do on tv okay well 0.96

00:29:57.620 they might not have tvs so let's chip him the tvs first perfect beautiful mind shit this guy is

00:30:04.580 just a dynamic problem solver also electricity famously available in rural areas of developing 0.70

00:30:10.640 countries in the 1960s sending sending utility companies to africa yeah exactly perfect he also

00:30:17.400 he also has this whole dumb thing where he wants to send crops like better more productive crops

00:30:23.460 to these populations so alongside the propaganda you send them like more productive seeds 0.95

00:30:27.620 but then he clearly understands that this is totally deranged because he says

00:30:31.700 improved strains of various crops developed elsewhere might not grow satisfactorily or

00:30:37.640 might be unacceptable to the local people as food yeah paul you can't just like send people in rural

00:30:44.240 china like here's this crop that you have no history with you don't know how to grow right

00:30:48.780 you don't know how to prepare well yeah but if they watch the television show that explains how 0.99

00:30:53.460 to grow it it's so funny to me that he like immediately devolves into this dorm room level 0.99

00:30:59.440 shit i know when he's trying to solve the problem so he also i've been saving the most deranged shit 0.98

00:31:06.240 he says at the toward the end of this chapter he says the bedrock requirement of the program would 0.99

00:31:11.600 have to be population control, necessarily including migration control, to prevent swamping

00:31:18.480 of aided areas by the less fortunate. This problem might be sidestepped by using the area concept

00:31:24.600 rather than strictly political units. Thus, if migration could be controlled,

00:31:30.160 some sections of India might be aided and others not.

00:31:34.660 The honest way to talk about this stuff would be to say, look, you and I, the reader,

00:31:41.600 need to make hard choices about what our future looks like and what we're going to do

00:31:46.380 to ensure that like the globe is habitable in the next 50 years. But the way he's talking about it

00:31:52.640 is like you and I are going to need to knock our heads together and think about which Indians 1.00

00:31:57.760 deserve to die. I know. I know. And also, he doesn't seem to understand the profundity of 1.00

00:32:06.700 what he's proposing here it's like so paul you are proposing that a foreign country the united

00:32:12.560 states split india into new political units according to who we think deserves to live or

00:32:20.480 die and then we are also setting up migration controls within another country to keep people

00:32:28.820 from moving from one part of their own country to another to be fair um at this point they're only

00:32:36.460 like 50 years out from um the west chopping up the middle east as it deemed fit i mean that's

00:32:41.520 the thing it's it's it's consistent at least you know it's it's the 60s and maybe he's looking

00:32:46.660 maybe back then they looked at the middle east and they were like that wasn't so bad yeah that

00:32:50.440 went well all those straight lines on a map is a really good sign let's do that more right i mean

00:32:55.880 how many countries restrict the internal movement of their own populations it's very few and they're

00:33:01.060 not like countries that we're in a lot of clubs with yeah you know if if someone brought this to

00:33:06.380 you to like any given population the only thing you can do is immediately prepare for war right

00:33:14.080 yes yes that's it's the logical thing to do and also i mean i am fascinated by this that someone

00:33:20.800 who considers himself a liberal right someone who knows enough about world politics to be like yeah

00:33:25.280 we've installed some dictators and like that's bad and like everyone deserves freedom and equality

00:33:29.160 is somehow talking himself into this like i mean this is worse than colonialism right

00:33:34.980 do you know how hard it is to make the world order worse than it currently is

00:33:39.060 paul's like hold my beer let's do this but it's just like you read this book and he just sort of

00:33:48.420 like that thing about oh you know we might have to throw in some migration controls and like oh

00:33:52.520 some areas of india and others and you're like these are not like footnotes paul right they're

00:33:56.960 like really, really huge things that you're proposing that are like totally unprecedented

00:34:02.700 and awful. And you're somehow talking yourself into like, well, you know, we all got to make

00:34:07.580 sacrifices. You know, you guys can't, you know, visit your family if they live across a fake line.

00:34:12.060 And, you know, I'm not going to get my child tax credit if I have a third kid. Like we're all in

00:34:18.120 this together. Also notice that in America, he's proposing rewards, right? You get a check if you

00:34:25.120 don't have kids right in india it's like you get a fucking fence between you and your neighbors 0.99

00:34:29.980 yeah you know i mean i wonder how much of it is purely selfish versus knowing that you can't pitch 0.98

00:34:38.420 actual sacrifice to america in a book right yeah like you can't you're not going to sell a book

00:34:45.200 that's like we all need to purposefully make our lives significantly worse right or else there'll

00:34:50.020 consequences. What you can do is say, what if we tinkered with the neoliberal order a bit

00:34:55.620 stateside? And over there, we instituted a brutal global regime of oppression in order to save us

00:35:06.080 and save our way of life. That's a book you can sell.

00:35:08.800 Well, this is I mean, this is what's kind of fascinating to me. It's like he's willing

00:35:12.140 to make these, you know, we need to make hard choices, bitter pill to swallow types of

00:35:17.360 recommendations for other people but then when it comes to america anything that has even the

00:35:21.520 potential to inconvenience him or anyone he knows he's like oh it would never work here like we

00:35:27.320 could never do it yeah he has a forward by this guy that works at the uh sierra club and he says

00:35:32.680 people are recognizing that we cannot forever continue to multiply and subdue the earth

00:35:37.560 without losing our standard of life and the natural beauty that must be part of it he's putting these

00:35:43.300 aesthetic concerns right front and center like for him it's about his standard of life it's about him 0.77

00:35:49.480 getting to visit fucking yosemite on the weekends it's so telling that he keeps mentioning these 0.61

00:35:54.740 like little inconveniences of daily life as a middle-aged guy in the bay area in the 1960s 0.96

00:36:01.060 because it's like this is what he's actually interested in his life has gotten a little bit

00:36:05.700 more annoying and like cities are getting more crowded harder to park yeah and he's blown this

00:36:10.620 up into like this national issue that's what's driving all of this right i mean and that's the

00:36:16.740 heart of reactionary politics right and you can see it in modern discourse too where there's like

00:36:22.280 they can dress it up in rhetoric that is often expressly left-wing if not just sort of gesturing

00:36:29.680 toward left-wing ideals when you start peeling back the onion what you start to find is petty

00:36:35.240 grievance. And, you know, grievance that amounts to, I want to continue to live my life in the

00:36:41.700 exact same way I was living it before, completely unfettered. That's what I see here, right? Is

00:36:48.720 the dressing up of these weird reactionary complaints about daily life in cities and 0.92

00:36:57.760 shit like that as like this global issue. Imagine, imagine what your life will be like if we continue 0.91

00:37:05.700 to let the population to expand. And what he wants you to envision is a world where things are

00:37:11.700 slightly more annoying. That to me is why, you know, I think you're right. He's deploying a lot

00:37:18.560 of left wing rhetoric. But this is not just reactionary in places. This is like fundamentally

00:37:24.940 totally reactionary this is like the essence of reaction exactly and also i mean this little i'm

00:37:30.460 so stuck on this phrase you know he says we you know we can't continue to multiply without losing

00:37:35.500 our standard of living and natural beauty and it's like but what about the standard of living

00:37:40.020 for people who live in india like you want them to eat different food totally change their way

00:37:44.920 of life and also parts of india are pretty beautiful too like there's there's natural

00:37:49.380 beauty outside of the united states my dude look if if i have to pay 30 more for diapers and uh and

00:37:58.080 two billion people on the other side of the planet have to die for me to continue to go on really

00:38:03.400 nice drives we're in this together so i mean that's the book he also he does some like forced

00:38:08.780 sterilization stuff yeah naturally he says that like we should send helicopters and like trained

00:38:14.160 medical professionals and and the funny thing is like that's so fucking odious but it's like the

00:38:18.580 fourth most odious thing in the book right by the time he gets the forced sterilization you're like 0.72

00:38:23.740 okay we've already we've already covered like supranational institutions did this lead to any

00:38:29.660 actual genocides i'm gonna be so mad oh dude i mean this led to i mean you can never draw a

00:38:34.680 straight line between you know a book and an outcome right but like forced sterilization

00:38:39.180 policies were very common like india had a like decade-long program this also led to the one

00:38:45.420 child policy in china oh jesus christ this was not you can't say this book completely but like

00:38:50.100 the panic over overpopulation right there was a point where bangladesh was spending 60 of its own 0.92

00:38:55.860 public health budget on population control efforts what the fuck a lot of poor countries 0.93

00:39:01.000 got roped into this because i mean first of all they you know they have inequalities in poor 0.97

00:39:05.640 countries and a lot of poor countries were run by like really nasty dictators at the time and they 0.99

00:39:09.280 loved this shit because they're like this is the way that i can crack down on minority populations 0.98

00:39:13.680 So there was a forced sterilization program in Peru by Fujimori that sterilized 290,000 women, 270,000 of which were indigenous women. 1.00

00:39:23.640 Because it's like, what a great way to find this population that threatens your power that you don't like anyway. 0.99

00:39:29.720 And you're like, oh, let's just make sure they can't have babies anymore.

00:39:32.180 And the U.S., there's actually quite a bit of debate of like how much the U.S. knew.

00:39:35.880 But like the U.S. didn't really step in to stop this and didn't step in to make sure this wasn't happening.

00:39:41.000 The World Health Organization was really big on population control. And a lot of times countries would tie their food aid and their financial aid to population control measures. So you can't get the shipment of food unless you put in place these policies. And so it sort of ends up having these effects where we're like imposing ideology on these poor countries. But it's never called that. It's never like, oh, like we're actually going to make you do this.

00:40:04.540 It's like, well, this is actually just the best thing.

00:40:07.380 Like science says that this is good for you.

00:40:09.680 So we just think you should do the good thing.

00:40:11.600 The discourse about aid to other countries, right, that you'll see coming from like the

00:40:15.760 right where they'll say, you know, we should be helping people at home before we ship out

00:40:19.400 money to other countries.

00:40:20.760 Not that they actually believe that.

00:40:22.320 But even if you take it at face value, it's like, you know, we're not really trying to

00:40:27.000 help them, right?

00:40:27.960 Like, you know, that money is being used to secure U.S. interests across the globe.

00:40:32.320 Right.

00:40:32.640 Like, I promise you we're not giving it to them for free in any meaningful sense.

00:40:37.100 There's also, oh my God, have you ever heard of zero population growth?

00:40:40.620 No.

00:40:41.000 This is another like really gross thing.

00:40:42.980 So the book comes out in 1968 and basically makes no splash at all. 0.89

00:40:47.700 Nobody gives a shit until 1970 when the author, Paul Ehrlich, is on The Tonight Show.

00:40:53.740 Okay. 0.93

00:40:54.560 After his appearance on The Tonight Show, the book ends up selling two million copies

00:40:58.360 and Johnny Carson has Paul Ehrlich on 20 more times.

00:41:01.540 Paul Erlich on one of these Tonight Show appearances mentions that like, oh, we need a grassroots effort to like control population.

00:41:08.720 So he starts or somebody starts this thing called zero population growth that became a really big movement on college campuses in the 1970s.

00:41:18.340 And then, I mean, this is like the least twistiest twist ever.

00:41:21.600 It ends up becoming really reactionary.

00:41:24.440 So within a couple of years, they're calling for the U.S. to reduce immigration by 90 percent.

00:41:29.980 population unfortunately and then it breaks off this like immigration control committee

00:41:37.800 something something of this group breaks off and becomes fair the federation for american

00:41:42.800 immigration reform which is like infamous right-wing nightmare organization oh my god the

00:41:49.640 one of one of the most how would i put it well let's just say one of the most visible anti-muslim

00:41:55.240 organizations in the country exactly so that that grows out like immediately like that's like a

00:42:00.560 little tumor that grows inside of zpg and then breaks off and becomes its own like reactionary

00:42:06.060 movement so it's like yeah paul this was like really really predictable and of course like

00:42:12.980 right-wing millionaires yeah the guy who runs the company you know the mix dixie cups okay he's like 0.98

00:42:19.320 a right-wing asshole and he put a bunch of full-page ads in like the new york times saying 1.00

00:42:24.140 like we have to control. He loved Paul Ehrlich. This guy whose fucking tiny cups are littering 1.00

00:42:29.760 the bottom of our ocean. Exactly. Is full of complaints about overpopulation. All right. So 1.00

00:42:34.900 it's now 2022. None of the things that he predicted have happened. Birth rates were

00:42:40.880 already flat and falling in Asia by the time he wrote this. They now say the next doubling time 0.88

00:42:46.740 for the human population is going to be 100 to 175 years. We will not reach the melting point

00:42:51.300 of iron in our lifetimes unfortunately not that would that would have been cool to see the having 0.93

00:42:55.840 sex while melting twitter would have been fucking crazy that week i'll tell you that

00:42:59.560 so birth rates have flattened out basically because economic growth and then also crop 0.97

00:43:06.860 yields have outpaced population growth every single year something that like that he never

00:43:11.360 gets into in his book that drives me nuts is that he never acknowledges the fact that we even knew

00:43:15.940 then that famines are political there's no such thing as a famine that is caused by like not

00:43:21.080 enough rainfall right kansas has years where there's not enough rainfall for crops and like

00:43:25.960 people do not starve in kansas it's about trade and consumption and like political systems right

00:43:31.980 it's it's not the 1300s right i mean like the the world is connected enough that if there is

00:43:36.920 massive starvation in one place it is at least to some degree because another place is not sending

00:43:43.180 them food right exactly and also i mean if you look at the numbers the charts are really stark

00:43:47.600 Like when he was writing his book, between 12 and 15 million people every year died in famines.

00:43:53.080 And now it's 75,000 people a year.

00:43:55.940 That's a month of COVID in America.

00:43:57.580 I know.

00:43:58.640 The reason that he's saying this will happen is just an overall global shortage of food, right?

00:44:05.640 Yes.

00:44:06.060 That's extremely different from localized shortages of food.

00:44:10.320 So Paul Ehrlich is still alive. 1.00

00:44:12.620 Oh, shit. 0.99

00:44:13.140 He's been proven wrong on like all of the central claims of his book. 1.00

00:44:17.000 and he just like won't backtrack. He wrote a book in 1990 called The Population Explosion.

00:44:24.360 Hell yeah. And then in 2018, he was interviewed and they're like, do you regret anything? And

00:44:29.360 he's like, yes, I didn't make dire enough predictions. It's really bad out there.

00:44:35.080 This is how you know he's a conservative. Just proven wrong. And people are like,

00:44:39.320 so obviously you're wrong. And he's like, don't agree, buddy. Don't agree.

00:44:42.780 Don't agree. You know what?

00:44:44.080 And to remind our listeners, he predicted hundreds of millions of deaths, right, in the 70s and 80s?

00:44:50.580 Yeah. At one point, he predicted major famines in the United States as well.

00:44:54.100 So I imagine his current defense is something like, look, the exact numbers were off, but the vibes were right. 0.98

00:45:00.980 I mean, because nobody reads these fucking books that go viral back in the day. 0.87

00:45:05.680 So he says, oh, well, look, I didn't really make any predictions in that book. 0.99

00:45:09.040 all I was saying is that the earth has a limit to how many people it can feed. Like that's his line

00:45:15.100 now. And it's like, no, dude, you said that a billion was the number of people that the earth

00:45:19.460 should have. You said that we had exceeded the limit. Like the fact that there is a limit is

00:45:23.160 totally banal. Nobody disagrees with that. And so I want to end with a quote about the reason

00:45:29.880 why this idea keeps coming up. Because as soon as you start Googling around, like type in

00:45:35.340 overpopulation, you start finding exactly these arguments getting resurrected again as like

00:45:41.320 climate change stuff. You find this in Jeffrey Sachs' book, The End of Poverty. You find it in

00:45:47.520 like Gates Foundation documents. There was an interview last fall with Jane Goodall where she

00:45:53.920 was like, you know, it might be time to start asking some tough questions about overpopulation.

00:45:58.460 Like this idea will not die. And I found a really fascinating article called

00:46:04.840 Barbarian Hordes, the Overpopulation Scapegoat in International Development Discourse

00:46:10.340 that basically tracks every single resurgence of this idea and basically tries to talk about it

00:46:16.100 as like a psychological phenomenon. Like, why do we keep returning to this argument? It says,

00:46:22.600 the specter of overpopulation functions as a scapegoat. It focuses attention on the ways in

00:46:27.820 which the subjects of development, widely imagined as animalistic barbarian hordes,

00:46:31.640 subvert their own development potential by breeding out of control.

00:46:35.880 In doing so, they threaten the ability of more sensible developed populations

00:46:39.360 to attain enjoyment in a world of rapidly diminishing natural resources.

00:46:43.700 The resilience of this frame in the face of copious contradictory evidence

00:46:47.200 suggests that its persistence defies purely rational evaluation

00:46:50.860 operating at a deeper psychodynamic register.

00:46:53.940 I think that's right.

00:46:55.340 And, you know, I sort of have come to understand reactionary impulses more as psychological phenomena rather than purely ideological manifestations.

00:47:07.100 Right.

00:47:07.200 To me, all of this runs very parallel to how conservatives talk about poor people in the United States and plenty of liberals, frankly, talk about poor people in the United States, right, where they are naturally searching for reasons to blame poor people for their own situation.

00:47:25.340 Right. You need to put it on them in some way so that the moral onus is off you.

00:47:31.040 Right. One of the things that bugs me so much about this discourse coming up again is is always packaged as like it's time to ask tough questions about overpopulation.

00:47:40.620 And it's the least tough question imaginable because it doesn't actually challenge anybody in power.

00:47:46.000 Right. If if the actual problem, as Paul Ehrlich says in his book a million times, is DuPont pouring chemicals into rivers, then like the question is, why are we allowing a company to do that?

00:47:56.680 If the problem is carbon pouring into the atmosphere, why are we doing that?

00:48:00.740 But it's not actually a tough question to ask.

00:48:03.260 Are poor people having too many babies?

00:48:05.480 Are people who aren't me responsible for their own conditions?

00:48:09.360 That's not a tough question.

00:48:10.440 That's a really easy question.

00:48:11.660 And that's why we keep asking it.

00:48:13.380 Right.

00:48:13.700 Right. There's no there's no moral judgment of the West inherent in it. Right. And the irony is that the policy solution proposed by Ehrlich, it's much more onerous. Right. Yeah.

00:48:27.260 You know, on one hand, it's like, well, what do we want to do? Do we want to pass a regulation saying DuPont can't pour those chemicals in the pond? No. Let's seize sovereignty from South Asian countries all at once, divvy them up and tell them exactly when and where they can breathe.

00:48:42.700 It's time to do the easy stuff. 1.00

00:48:45.320 You know, the real tragedy here is that at the time this book came out, there wasn't, like, a hit piece apparatus.

00:48:53.440 Because if this came out now, there'd be some New Yorker piece called, like, The Butterfly Dipshit.

00:48:59.880 And then, you know, if someone brought him up, brought this up at a party, they were like, hey, have you heard about this Ehrlich guy's book?

00:49:05.800 You'd be like, you mean The Butterfly Dipshit?

00:49:09.140 And what can you say to that?

00:49:10.460 You know, the conversation's over.

00:49:12.700 Thank you.

If Books Could Kill - December 15, 2022

The Population Bomb

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